Retired Clarenville teacher stars in two new N.L. tourism ads

It was a case of being in the right place at the right time.

Janice
Hardy Walsh was born and raised in Carbonear, but spent her summers visiting
her working father in Battle Harbour.

“I spent 22
summers there growing up,” Walsh told TC Media. “In order to see dad, who worked
there from May to November, that’s where we would go. As soon as school closed,
perhaps even before school closed, we would go to Battle Harbor. My school
friends used to tease me because I’d come back and forth to Newfoundland. They
used to call me Ms. Battle Harbour.”

That
connection to Battle Harbour has recently landed Walsh in not one, but two Newfoundland
and Labrador tourism ads.

The two
ads, Connection and Journey Back, were filmed in August of
2016, and uploaded to the Newfoundland and Labrador Tourism YouTube channel
Wednesday, Mar. 8.

Janice
Hardy Walsh was born and raised in Carbonear, but spent her summers visiting
her working father in Battle Harbour.

“I spent 22
summers there growing up,” Walsh told TC Media. “In order to see dad, who worked
there from May to November, that’s where we would go. As soon as school closed,
perhaps even before school closed, we would go to Battle Harbor. My school
friends used to tease me because I’d come back and forth to Newfoundland. They
used to call me Ms. Battle Harbour.”

That
connection to Battle Harbour has recently landed Walsh in not one, but two Newfoundland
and Labrador tourism ads.

The two
ads, Connection and Journey Back, were filmed in August of
2016, and uploaded to the Newfoundland and Labrador Tourism YouTube channel
Wednesday, Mar. 8.

Walsh, not
long retired from teaching primary children in Clarenville, where she taught
for over 20 years, says she wanted to reconnect with Battle Harbour. In the
summers of 2015 and 2016, she revisited Battle Harbour, performing as a
volunteer tour guide, guiding tourists around the island and telling them
stories from the past. She says she just happened to be at the right place at
the right time.

“When I retired
from teaching a couple years ago, that was my goal — to spend the summer there.
I wanted to go back and reconnect. Last summer I just went down for a few weeks
and I just happened to be ‘Johnny-on-the-spot’. Tourism Newfoundland was there
… and they invited me to be a part of it,” said Walsh.

“I didn’t expect
it to be like it was … I thought I might be a little spec. I didn’t think they
were gonna use the vocal parts as much. It’s lovely. It’s amazing. They were
great people.”

Walsh told
The Packet that Journey Back is
special because she was able to discuss her father at great lengths.

Myrtle Rumbolt, Janice Hardy Walsh, and Jeanette Trimm.

“He kept
everything. All of those artifacts that he kept, all of those silly, crazy,
things, they’re all catalogued there in Battle Harbour, they’re all on display
… He would search, and he had such a passion for it. He would search for what
things were. Some of the strangest objects on Earth are in Battle Harbour. And
he would find out what they were for.”

For Walsh,
her opportunity to reconnect to Battle Harbour, a place she has loved all her
life, has now become an opportunity to share Battle Harbour with the world.

“For me to
be able to tell a little bit of the story so that people pay attention, and
want to come, and want to help it survive for the other generations, I think
that’s humbling for me. I just did it because I just want it to survive. I can’t
imagine being to the point were you can’t get back to Battle Harbour.”

“The people
there are beautiful people. Once you’re there you just have a hard time letting
it go.”